Chapter 4. User-managed Backup and Recovery

This chapter will cover backup and recovery using user-managed methods. I decided to include this topic in the book due that I still receive many questions about this topic at Oracle conferences and even on my blog. User-managed backups are basically all the backups which you can take without using RMAN. Moreover, no automatic metadata record of the backup is generated anywhere in the database. Therefore, you must always keep records of what you backed up and where. Also, this method allows a DBA to make consistent backups of the entire database (cold backup), partial backups of a database making one or more tablespaces offline (inconsistent backup) or even online backups (inconsistent backup) can be performed as well if your database is running in the ARCHIVELOG mode.

The last option allows you to perform user-managed backups without affecting the availability of your database to the business, very useful when your database needs to be available...